Yesterday I was presenting on the MySQL Document Store and was asked if the _id fields created by the server as an InnoDB primary key is a UUID.  I knew that it was not a UUID but I had to hit the documentations (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/x-devapi-userguide/en/understanding-automatic-document-ids.html) to find out what the document ID really is -- a very interesting piece of information.
The Details If you are inserting a document lacking a _id key, the server generates a value. The _id is 32 bits of a unique prefix (4 bytes), a time stamp (8 bytes), and serial number (16 bytes). The prefix is assigned by the InnoDB Cluster to help ensure uniqueness across a cluster. The timestamp is the encoded startup time of the server.  The serial numbers uses the auto increment offset and auto increment increment server variables .  From the manual page:
This document ID format ensures …

Pretend you have a JSON array of data that looks roughly like the following.

mysql> insert into x(y) values('["a","b","c","d"]');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.10 sec)

You could get all the values from that array using $[*]

mysql> select y->"$[*]" from x;
+----------------------+
| y->"$[*]"            |
+----------------------+
| ["a", "b", "c", "d"] |
+----------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Or the individual members of the array with an index that starts with zero.

mysql> select y->"$[0]" from x;
+-----------+
| y->"$[0]" |
+-----------+
| "a"       |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

But what about the times you want the last item in the array and really do not want to loop through all the items? How about using …

“The single most important lesson I’ve learned is to keep it simple. I find designers sometimes deliver over-complex, generic solutions that could (in theory) do anything, but in reality are remarkably difficult to operate, and often misunderstood.”–John Ryan

I have interviewed John Ryan, Data Warehouse Solution Architect (Director) at UBS.

RVZ

Q1. You are an experienced Data Warehouse architect, designer and developer. What are the main lessons you have learned in your career?

John Ryan: The single most important lesson I’ve learned is to keep it simple. I find designers sometimes deliver over-complex, generic solutions that could (in theory) do anything, but in reality are remarkably difficult to operate, and often misunderstood. I believe this stems from a lack of understanding of the …

via GIPHY I was at a dinner party recently, and talking with some colleagues. I had worked with them years back on Oracle systems. One colleague Maria said she really enjoyed my newsletter. Join 38,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. She went on to say how much has changed in the last …

Continue reading "How is automation impacting the dba role?"

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents 2017 Year in Review for Open Source Database Software on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 7:00 am PST / 10:00 am EST (UTC-8).

Register Here

2017 is soon coming to an end, and it’s good to pause and take a look at the past year to see the impact of new software release. Colin will discuss the changes, growth and trends that have affected software producers and enterprises using open source.

Key topics will include:

• How has the software supply chain landscape …

JSON data is a wonderful way to store data without needing a schema but what about when you have to yank that data out of the database and apply some sort of formatting to that data?  Well, then you need JSON_TABLE.

JSON_TABLE takes free form JSON data and applies some formatting to it.  For this example we will use the world_x sample database's countryinfo table.  What is desired is the name of the country and the year of independence but only for the years after 1992.  Sound like a SQL query against JSON data, right? Well that is exactly what we are doing.

We tell the MySQL server that we are going to take the $.Name and $.IndepYear key's values from the JSON formatted doc column in  the table, format them into a string and a integer respectively, and alias the key value's name to a table column name that we can use for qualifiers in an SQL statement.

 …

Embedding Structured Query Language (SQL) within PHP, or other programming languages, has been problematic for some. Mixing two programming languages together is just plainly not aesthetically pleasing. Especially when you have a declarative language (SQL) mixed with a procedural-object oriented language. But now, with the MySQL XDevAPI PECL extension, PHP developers can now stop mixing the two languages together together. MySQL Document StoreThe MySQL Document Store eliminates the heavy burden for SQL skills. It is designed to be a high speed, schema-less data store and is based on the MySQL JSON data type. This gives you roughly a gigabyte of store in a document format to do with as needed. So you do not need to architect you data before hand when you have no idea how it will evolve. No need to normalize your data. Now behind the scenes …

via GIPHY Amazon releases a new database offering every other day. It sure isn’t easy to keep up. Join 35,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Let’s say you’re hiring a devops & you want to suss out their database knowledge? Or you’re hiring a professional services firm or freelance consultant. Whatever the … Continue reading How to interview an amazon database expert →

I am starting a series of videos on the MySQL Document Store. The Document Store allows those who do not know Structured Query Language (SQL) to use a database without having to know the basics of relational databases, set theory, or data normalization. The goal is to have sort 2-3 minute episodes on the various facets of the Document Store including the basics, using various programming languages (Node.JS, PHP, Python), and materializing free form schemaless, NoSQL data into columns for use with SQL.

The first Episode, Introduction, can be found here.

Please provide feedback and let me know if there are subjects you would want covered in the near future.

via GIPHY I was just responding to some Disqus comments on a recent blog post. Admittedly it had a provocative title Will SQL databases just die already. What do you think? Join 34,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. A reader pointed out that some No-SQL databases do support joins. Huh? My face … Continue reading A roughneck walk down database alley →